Ashton Jeanty did something rarely seen on Saturday: He played in the second half.
While college football's leading rusher and the current Heisman Trophy favorite has sat for the second half frequently in games Boise State has been winning comfortably, Saturday's rock fight against Hawai'i required the superstar to work a full day for once. As for the production? Business as usual. He finished with 31 carries for 217 yards and a touchdown, plus three catches for an additional 20 yards and another score.
It was enough to keep the junior atop the odds board for the second straight week, a place he deserves to be, according to 2012 Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel.
"I think at the end of the day right now, it's Ashton Jeanty's race to lose," Manziel said during his weekly appearance on our own BBOC YouTube channel, Action Network's flagship college football platform. "I don't know what it's going to take to knock him down. It's really up to everybody else having to come up and chase him down."
Boise State, whose only loss is a three-point defeat to No. 2 Oregon in Eugene, is on a bye this week before a highly anticipated meeting on the road against UNLV, which is the Broncos' most prominent competitor for the Mountain West crown and a potential College Football Playoff bid.
One of the players trying to chase Jeanty down is Travis Hunter. The Colorado two-way star entered the weekend second to Jeanty on the odds board, but left the Buffaloes' loss to Kansas State with an injury. After starting the weekend around +300, he's now 12-1 at DraftKings, behind Jeanty, Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel, Miami quarterback Cam Ward, and Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe.
While Hunter's ability to play both offense and defense — and dominate on both sides of the ball — is what made him a contender in the first place, like Jeanty, the fact that he's not a quarterback makes his margin for error much slimmer while vying for an award frequently dominated by signal-callers. As of this writing, it's unknown if Hunter will miss Colorado's game this weekend at Arizona, and Manziel thinks that while missing a game would obviously hurt Hunter's chances, it's not the end of his campaign.
"The one thing he needed to do was stay healthy," Manziel said. "Missing a game is obviously going to put him back a little bit, but it also would probably be a good time to buy. He's going to have to continue to play well to keep this Heisman run going."
Johnny Manziel appears weekly on Action Network's BBOC YouTube channel, with Johnny's Intangibles releasing every Monday and Johnny's Scramble Drill releasing every Friday. He also appears on BBOC Live, which airs every Saturday at 10:30 a.m. ET on the BBOC YouTube channel and the Action App.
